Dishonest to God

"Yes, she’s arguing for politics without religion, taking religion out of politics. It’s a very dramatic title, and I have a lot of sympathy with what she’s saying. She’s particularly irritated and indeed angry about the impression being given by some religious people that religion is the source of all morality and that it holds the high moral ground. For example, she is annoyed by the assumption of some that the bishops in the House of Lords are custodians of public morality, whereas of course the bishops are neither better nor worse than most other members in terms of their capacity for moral discernment. So I have a lot of sympathy with her for that and also for her plea that there is a basis for moral values that is not simply religious, but is rooted in our capacity for imaginative sympathy with other people and our sense that we are all human beings, frail and subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. It is that which enables us to create a morality as well as an aesthetic, and also, she argues, religion, but this capacity she regards as rooted in our human nature. I entirely agree with all that, and my view is that we must recognise and celebrate values whoever puts them forward, whether people are believers or not. But where I think Mary Warnock goes badly wrong is the impression she gives that all religious morality is of the command variety – these are God’s commands, these are God’s laws. She seems to suggest that these are God’s laws only for believers. Indeed, she begins her book suggesting that’s the kind of religion she was brought up in. But, actually, traditional Christian thought contains what is called natural law, and the basic assumption behind this is that all human beings have a basic capacity, by virtue of being human, for moral insight and moral discernment; in short, however flawed, doing what is right, and discerning what this is belongs to our nature as such. And certainly St Paul argues for that, saying that people have the moral law written in their own hearts, so you don’t have to be religious to have a strong moral sense. I think that Mary Warnock is creating a wrong impression when she suggests that all religious morality is of the command and obedience sort and that this is just for religious believers. In fact, not all religiously-based morality is like that; it involves the use of reason reflecting on what it is the right thing to do as a human being in society, whether we have a religious belief or not. In the debate in the House of Lords on euthanasia, nobody appealed to specifically religious arguments – despite what Polly Toynbee continually says in The Guardian – that euthanasia bills are blocked by a cabal of bishops, rabbis and so on. There was no specific appeal to religious considerations. However, I think that religion does come into it in a much more subtle way, when you are evaluating suffering, and whether suffering is the worst evil. When you’re thinking of human beings and whether they are isolated individuals or whether it’s essential to our human nature that we are mutually interdependent, it seems to me that a religious perspective on existence will weight the argument in a particular way, a different way perhaps from someone who hasn’t got a religious faith. If we use John Rawls’s term of public reasoning, then everything that went on in this debate was public reasoning, something which Mary Warnock would approve of: morality without any ostensible appeal to religion. But a religious view of what it is to be a human being in society evaluated those arguments in slightly different ways. For instance, since the 17th century Britain has had an over-individualistic understanding of what it is to be a human being. But from a Christian point of view we are not isolated individuals, we are persons in community. Again, a secular point of view tends to think that being totally in control of one’s own life is what is fundamental to our human worth and dignity, and that if you lose control of it somehow all is lost, whereas the Christian faith would want to emphasise that life is a process of dependence and independence, it’s a mixture, and to be dependent and not in total control, which we all are for some of our lives, doesn’t mean to say that we in any way lose our human dignity or value. That’s a Christian consideration, which influences the argument in a rather more subtle way and which makes one understand a person who is in a terrible state in a somewhat different way from a person with a different view of what it is to be a human being in society. I very much feel for some of the people we read about who ask to die, and I do not know how I would behave in that situation. But I certainly do not see them as having lost all their value or dignity or worth as a human being because they are not in control of their life. Yes, I think they were, there was public reasoning in that anyone can grasp in non-religious terms what was being said, but actually a religious perspective has been fed into it in a particular way, a way that has been assimilated, and that, I suspect, is a good example of what Habermas might mean. Yes, religion has a very bad name in certain quarters at the moment, and very understandably so. When it is associated with violence, when it is associated with right-wing fundamentalism, when it is associated with an authoritarian approach to morality, when it’s associated with claims for the high moral ground, when there’s any insinuation that people who don’t have a religious view of life are by that very fact immoral, then there are powerful reasons for keeping it out of the political arena. My point would be that those are not the only forms of religion around and there are other forms of religion that can make a valuable contribution to politics."